Sight Unseen: Angst 2

That last memory of his mother is now so many hundreds of thousands of last memories of her. The terror in her eyes and the knife in her chest now as small as the room for the rest of his life. For 70 years “Oh my god” were his last words. He could fantasize like he had a mind to want to. And it’s this we see, that urging to be human. This film literally provokes me to imagine the greatest things: Mommy and Daddy there, wrapped in wet diapers, freezing to death. And behind him in the sink: a swan he once strangled till its head came off. And it had liked humans very much. It seems then like reciprocation when I watch him eat it raw over years. On weekends, too many now, his tiny Austrian cell fills the basement I’m in, gets me psychobabbling in my couch on dreams of flowers of earthworms of garlands of blood. What inner life I had has become this locked up man’s perpetual absence of pure joy. I do not sleep for crime, for the crime of the waking up that is always what is happening again, that is always a meeting with somebody that doesn’t exist and some somebody’s parody of recognition. In his cell at night he’s surrounded by attractive young girls. They stare at him as if he is their escape, their joyless money, their first boyfriend soaked in a whore’s gush and afraid of himself, of dying of fear. In my basement the size of his cell I tie myself up, seal my mouth shut, hit my eyes with a belt until all I can see is that this film wants to hit me till I’m dead, till I’m religious, a pig, a fostered son, a fox pretending to be dying. And so a large isolated house with white walls is a catastrophe: it’s what it means to die, to wake up, to whimper like a corpse. And we both take the family with us, looking to expand its membership, to show the dead ones to the dead ones. But I cannot stand the torture of this floating, this body-lightness, this crawling upside down along ceilings as if no moment was ever my fault. The wurst there is wurst than pity in the eyes of someone you’re killing. But the contents thrill me. The contents are perverse. Coda: A personality is pliable and abandoned by its mother.